Maria Tsaptsinos: Finlandia Open 2014

Maria Tsaptsinos

...started playing table tennis during the last year of her primary schooling and then joined Kingfisher club whereas she trained with Brian Halliday and later had weekly sessions with Gareth Herbert. Then she was invited to Lilleshall and Sheffield for the Youth Development Squad and consequently to the International Youth Squad. Represented England in various tournaments since 2012 and participated at the Youth Europeans as a Caded and Junior. In 2015 the first call for a senior cap came for the Europeans and Table Tennis Commonwealth.
Maria currently is a scholar at University of Nottingham studying Geography.
Her other interests include football, music and spends time socialising on facebook.

Sponsors: Tees Sport, Spire Dunedin Hospital, SSE with the help of SportsAid, Table Tennis 365, TASS

Sunday, 7 December 2014

Finlandia Open 2014

Maria's first senior tournament at Finland, 4th to the 7th of December 2014, provided a platform to test her abilities. Maria travelled to Finland with Karina Le Fevre and they were unfortunate to meet at the first round the fifth seeds of the team event from Poland. They lost 3-0 with Maria playing Magdalena Siroska with a World ranking of 211 and managed to get one set (-6 12 -8 -5). Maria is currently ranked 506th at the Seniors with 1297 points.
The following days, for singles, Maria finished 51st overall with 4 wins and 3 losses.

Rei Yamamoto (Japan): 0-4 (-7, -3, -8, -4)
Elena Dubkova (Bulgaria, WR163, 1985 points) : 4-0 to Maria (walk over)
Irina Ermakova (Russia, WR293, 1719 points): 2-4 (-8, 6, 4, -10, -9, -6)
Anna Ivannikova (Russia, WR468, 1377 points): 4-0 (6, 6, 11, 8)
Alexandra Falarz (Poland, WR430, 1436 points): 4-3 (-9, 9, 8, -5, 6, -8, 6)
Rahel Aschwanden (Switzerland, WR247, 1797 points): 0-4 (-5, -9, -8, -6)
Michaella Karlsson (Sweden, WR428, 1448 points): 4-3 (-9, -9, -11, 3, 5, 6, 9)